> We treat all markets in the same way, but they aren’t all the same.
This is completely inaccurate. The US healthcare market (much like finance, pharmaceuticals, construction, most of the largest farming industries, etc, right down to the expensive licensing required to be a hair stylist or interior designer) are some of the most heavily regulated markets in the world.
The US health insurance market has been the farthest thing from a free market for some time. Whether health insurance would benefit from total centralization is one thing (one of the few markets I personally believe in being gov controlled).
Agencies like the FAA and FDA are some of the largest and most thorough of all regulatory agencies in the world. One that other foreign governments with allegedly "big government" administrative agencies look up to as a model replicate or simply take their findings as policy instead of testing their own.
Pretending the US economy is some capitalist free-for-all is one of the biggest global misconceptions.
The rising cost of the US health care market vs the world [1] has little to do with lack of gov intervention but the result of a centuries worth of half-baked compromises between two different worldviews, often featuring the worst of both worlds.
I feel that you are responding a different comment than mine. I have not said that it is a hyper-capitalistic free-for-all. Quite the opposite, from my comment;
> healthcare isn’t composed of one market, but several between different operators operating under different market forces and regulatory rules. As it’s too complicated to go into each, I’ll go into one that’s most apparent
The market that exists between Hospitals and Suppliers is different than Health Insurance and Consumers (and businesses) which is different from Insurance and Independent Providers... There isn’t one big “healthcare” market but several interacting with one another in removed ways.
My definition of a market is,
The term market refers to a situation where buyers (consumers) and sellers (producers) interact (directly or through intermediaries) to trade goods and services. It is a situation where forces of demand and supply interact to determine prices of goods and services being exchanged. Therefore, a market includes mechanism for: determining prices and quantities of the traded item, communicating information about prices, and for the distribution of the goods and services.
This can be argued to a certain degree for any modern commodity, but healthcare is a unique beast in how different forces for each market is and how interrelated they seem to be. However, I can be wrong about this part.
I have also said that I am proving my point in the context of an idealized free market. My goal is to show from first principles what pop literature seems to miss;
> Assuming the most idealized of cases that exist without external constraints and regulations, this market would never be a free market.
I have specified my definition of free markets elsewhere.
This is completely inaccurate. The US healthcare market (much like finance, pharmaceuticals, construction, most of the largest farming industries, etc, right down to the expensive licensing required to be a hair stylist or interior designer) are some of the most heavily regulated markets in the world.
The US health insurance market has been the farthest thing from a free market for some time. Whether health insurance would benefit from total centralization is one thing (one of the few markets I personally believe in being gov controlled).
Agencies like the FAA and FDA are some of the largest and most thorough of all regulatory agencies in the world. One that other foreign governments with allegedly "big government" administrative agencies look up to as a model replicate or simply take their findings as policy instead of testing their own.
Pretending the US economy is some capitalist free-for-all is one of the biggest global misconceptions.
The rising cost of the US health care market vs the world [1] has little to do with lack of gov intervention but the result of a centuries worth of half-baked compromises between two different worldviews, often featuring the worst of both worlds.